


Ex Altiora

by soupgoblin



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Art, I dont know how to tag this I just wrote ex altiora, Leitner Books (The Magnus Archives), basically a spooky love letter to the sky, ex altiora, mr sims sir I made the book can I PLEASE be an avatar of the vast now, the vast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:53:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25033510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soupgoblin/pseuds/soupgoblin
Summary: So yeah I made Ex Altiora. Feat pictures of the book and the illustrations I did for it :)
Comments: 29
Kudos: 94





	Ex Altiora

**Author's Note:**

> yeah so one night the thought of "wouldn't it be cool to have a leitner" rapidly evolved into "oh my god I could make a leitner" and then for several weeks I did nothing else, but now I have ex altiora I guess, which is pretty neat. the borders on the illustrations were inspired by this (https://www.behance.net/gallery/93089119/Ex-Altiora-Block-Print) lovely print by Stephanie Osborne. also if anyone was interested, this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zQ10nLhpU0&app=desktop) is the tutorial I used to bind the book! and apologies for my gross hands in the photos, the pages don't lie flat by themselves. alright I'll be quiet now, enjoy!

On the highest cliff, the steep, crumbling edge of which overlooked a vast land of sweeping plains and jagged mountains, clung the highest village - a small town, the name of which has long since been forgotten. It was a town like many others, where the people lived quietly, and did not stir great unrest between neighbouring kingdoms or anger their gods. There were few people, but they lived companionably, each doing their own job contentedly and without complaint.

In the cold autumn months the clifftop, high as it was, was often shrouded in mist, blocking the villagers’ view of the world beyond and wrapping the town in a bubble where all that existed was their isolated, echoey home. Tell me, how did tragedy find such a peaceful town of honest men? It began when a series of days like the quiet, clouded ones I have described broke, and the villagers emerged from their houses to a clear sky. Upon the clearing of the mist they could see for miles and miles, across all the land, and being the highest point they could also see the entire, unshielded, infinite stretch of sky encircling them. As the villagers looked out over the land, far in the distance at the very end of the world they saw a beast so large its head was hidden in the clouds that gathered at the horizon. From so far away, its thick legs would have looked like the trunks of huge, ancient trees if the beast wasn’t

very slowly and steadily approaching the town. The oldest and wisest man in the village called a meeting in the town square to decide what to do about this beast. In the town square gathered the butcher, the blacksmith, the farmer and his wife, the prince and his page, the carpenter, the baker, the bard, the tailor, and the town fool. When all were gathered, the old man said:

“We must stop this demon before it reaches us.” The townsfolk all nodded in agreement, for though they were not sure why, they knew with certainty when they looked upon the beast that they _could not let it reach them_.

“We must fight it!” declared the butcher, brandishing his meat cleaver. He was an angry man, who did not like people taking what was rightfully his. He had been a worthy protector for the village in times past. “We must use weapons and violence to destroy this beast, when it arrives!”

“Yes!” the villagers agreed. “The giant is at the edge of the world and yet we cannot even see its face. It is coming for us. We must destroy it.”

So, the butcher returned to his shop. The walls were lined with sharp axes and cleavers and knives, kept in pristine condition to carve the meat hanging from hooks on the ceiling and filling the air with the stench of blood. He took down his tools and tied them up in a bundle, and took them outside, where he handed them out to the villagers. They had served him well to carve their livestock and keep the village fed, and so they would serve them well to fight the demon, when it inexorably reached the village. The villagers took the tools and began practicing lunges and strikes, picturing how they would slash at the giant and fell it. The old man watched them contemplatively but did not join. The giant kept moving all day, slowly covering a fraction of the world laid out between the highest cliff and the horizon. Yet still, it was lands away from the villagers and the day was good and clear. They fell to their work, farming and sewing and baking and singing and building, keeping their weapons close at hand, finding comfort in the wooden grip of a handle. The sun set below the horizon and just for a moment the body of the beast was lit up golden, and a horrifying form of bizarre and terrifying proportions was silhouetted against the very edge of the world. But then the darkness ate the beast up and a sky dancing with stars rose a fingertip from the highest village and wrapped around the world like a blanket.

The next morning the villagers all left their houses to another sunlit day, the view to the horizon clear. When they looked out for the beast however, they found it had moved still closer, and stood now in the vast and tumbling desert near the end of the world. As it stood among the sand dunes peppered with drifting marram grass, the villagers could see with more clarity the scale of the beast. Its feet, though distant and blurry, dwarfed the rolling dunes that covered that distant, sun streaked land. All of a sudden, the villagers’ butchering tools felt silly and fragile in their hands, only big enough to carve up a cow, and not a demon. They threw them down angrily at the butcher’s feet. Seeing that their plan would not work, the old man called another meeting, and the villagers gathered in the town square.

“Your weapons are too small!” cried the blacksmith. “We will never defeat the beast with these kitchen tools!”

“What do you propose we do then?” asked the butcher.

“The giant stands well above the sand dunes, its head absorbed in the heavens. We cannot fell it with axes as we would a tree. For this foe, we must fight with gunpowder and steel!” The villagers all nodded and agreed that mightier weapons were needed. So, the blacksmith went back to his shop, where an open front kept him from overheating as he fired up a great furnace made of scorched brick. With glowing metal and barrels of gunpowder he worked all day as the sun traversed the sky, until finally he emerged with a cannon. It was a huge cannon that glinted in the light of the failing day, and the villagers marvelled at the blacksmith’s handiwork. They tugged the cannon onto the furthest point of the cliff and angled it out towards the demon.

“It will not be able to reach us now! We shall shoot it down when it arrives!” cheered the villagers. The oldest and wisest man watched them from the village, and quietly blew a ring of drifting smoke from his pipe. As night fell over the highest cliff the air cooled, and the villagers huddled inside their tiny houses with their children, safe near enough to the fires for their warm glow to reach them, and content in the knowledge that they were defended from the beast. Above them, constellations twinkled gently, studded in the black of night that hid the monster and the lands below from their view.

On the third morning the villagers awoke and left their houses to a dewy, cool morning, but once more a clear one, with a view of all the lands until the edge of the world. They found that the demon moved ever closer, and it stood in the great plains of long grass that stretched across the land, where stalking creatures crawled unnoticed amongst dried grass and cracked dirt, and the wind made the fields flow and ripple like a golden ocean. The demon stood in the plains, and the tall grass did not cover so much as its feet. It stretched upwards, still obscured by gentle white clouds, so huge it seemed to almost float above the surroundings, so unaffected by them it was. Although it was far off, the villagers could see that it was still moving steadily towards their village, covering vast amounts of the land in each awful, sweeping footstep. A nervousness began growing in the villagers, a nasty worm of thought that they did not allow themselves to think, but lodged nonetheless in their brains. Their shiny cannon felt all of a sudden very small. They would never be able to shoot down the beast with such a puny weapon. The old man called a meeting in the town square and the villagers assembled.

“We cannot fight the beast!” the villagers cried. “It is too huge, and we are too small.”

“Well you shan’t find a better weapon to be wielded by man,” said the blacksmith haughtily, for he was proud of his work. The farmer’s wife now spoke:

“We villagers cannot fight the beast, but we have beasts of our own. We must feed our livestock up until it is big enough to fight what we cannot.” The villagers all agreed to this plan, as it seemed clear they would find no better, and ran to the farmer’s barn – a sturdy building speckled with holes that let dappled light fall on the dusty floor – and began hauling out the bales of hay. The farmer’s wife lead their largest bull with the sharpest horns out into the field, and the villagers brought it the hay bales. It ate until there was none left, and then the villagers brought it more hay, until the whole barn was empty. At the end of the day the bull had gorged itself to the size of a house. It was the largest beast any of the villagers had even seen and they marvelled at the sight. Its horns were like rapiers and its great torso would fell a tree as easily as knocking over a fencepost. The bull itself mooed amiably, unaware of its role, but the villagers felt confident with their creature that was surely big enough to fight off the giant, and as the sun set over the far-off plains, they went to their beds content in the knowledge of their protector, and forgot all about the giant moving ever closer. The old man drew his curtains tightly. Above the land the stars rose, and the deep black of night rendered all past the village’s torchlight invisible.

On the fourth morning, the villagers woke up and left their houses to see with dismay that the demon had left the plains and reached the monument – a colossal spire relic from the old days that marked the edge of the wastes beyond. From as far away as the cliff it looked unimpressive, like a needle in the landscape, but the villagers had all heard the stories of its grandeur. It was said to be 100 storeys tall and made of solid pearl, and to act as a beacon to the stars, where men told tales of the awful beauty of the world and all that lay above it – and beside it, where its spiral peak brushed the clouds, the demon’s body disappeared into the sky. The villagers looked in dismay at the gargantuan creature that made the ancient spire look like a spindle, and then back at their bull, which mooed, and plodded away from the village to search for more food. The old man called a meeting in the town square.

“The giant has reached the edge of the wastes,” said the baker. “How soon will it reach our village?”

The villagers all turned to the old man, who was the wisest of all of them.

“It will arrive in seven days,” the old man said. Cries of alarm rung out amongst the villagers.

“But we cannot fight it! It is too large for even our greatest beasts,” said the farmer’s wife.

“You are all foolish,” declared the prince in his deep purple cloak.

“Foolish!” echoed his page, who wore a cloak that was more mauve than purple.

“We cannot _fight_ this beast, so we must pay it. If we gather all the riches in the village, we can barter with the beast to get it to leave,” ordered the prince.

“Barter with the beast!” cried his page.

Although hesitant the villagers obeyed their prince’s orders and returned to their homes. The carpenter brushed the dust off his family’s small jar of savings. The butcher took down the gold framed portrait handed down through his family. The bard retrieved his rosewood harp, engraved with gemstone details, and they all brought their treasures to the centre of town, where they piled them in the farmer’s cart. They might have had more reservations about giving up their treasures if it was not for the nagging feeling of absolute certainty that this was something far greater than them that they felt in the back of their minds when they glanced out at the giant. In his little palace, with smart wooden flooring and rich tapestries in red and blue, the page counted out exactly half of the prince’s gold, which he carted into the centre of town. The mound of treasure the villagers built was impressive and glinted a dozen shades of gold in the sunlight. Although the villagers were not rich by any means, all together they gathered enough to buy

their own village once over. The prince looked very pleased.

“We shall pay the giant in gold and riches, and it will have to leave us be!” he said. The oldest man brought his coppers to the pile, but did not reply to the prince’s boasts. The villagers cheered for their efforts, but each had a pit of fear in his stomach. The gold looked awfully big, but they knew the spiral spire was even bigger, and the old man’s countdown ticked silently in each of their heads. Autumn was getting on, and though their view of the lands below remained clear, a chill had begun to settle into the bones of the villagers and the timbers of their houses, and as big as they built their fires, the cold blue of the unblinking sky always seemed bigger and colder. Still, they had prepared their gold and there was always more work to be done, so the villagers ignored the being striding ceaselessly across the land, and wrapped up a little warmer, and did not look out of the window as the sun set and the stars rose to lay watchful eyes on the dusky lands below.

On the fifth morning the villagers woke to the coldest day yet. To their horror they found that once again the beast had moved closer, and had reached the crawling forest. The forest stood tall in the lands below, for its ancient trees grew to soaring heights, the twisting branches reaching desperately up and clinging to the sky, the whole forest growing atop itself in an effort to climb higher. The thousand-year canopy cast the forest below into a dark and dappled night where spirits wandered amongst too-large animals. The trees of the crawling forest were the largest living things in the world. Except, of course, for the giant – whose body broke out of the canopy, its awful being visible for just a flash before its head was devoured once more by the gathering grey clouds. The villagers tried to picture just how big the giant must truly be. They felt sick.

“A storm is brewing,” the old man thought, and shook his head as he once more called the villagers to the town square. The villagers’ confidence was steadily draining. The cart of their treasure had blown off the cliff in the violent winds of the night, but it wouldn’t have mattered either way, for it was clear now the beast was far too huge to be bought by trivial human treasures. Time was beginning to run out.

“There is nothing to do!” despaired the fool. “We must abandon our village!” The villagers all scoffed at this.

“We cannot leave our village! It is our home!” they cried, and did not listen to the fool any further.

“It is simple. We must build a wall,” said the carpenter. “A huge wall, to keep this dreadful god away from us.” The villagers - bar the wailing fool - all agreed that this was the best plan, and so the carpenter returned to his shop, where the low ceilings trapped sweet-smelling oils and filled the air with sawdust, and the intricate carvings hung on the walls filled the room with the colour of mahogany. He retrieved from his storeroom all the wood he had, and the villagers gathered at the edge of the highest cliff, where they began the work of building a wall. The wind was growing stronger, but they held firm and built until the wall grew taller than the prince’s palace, and then taller still. They built the wall around the village until they had no more wood left to build with, and it towered up into the clouds, completely blocking their view of the lands below – but more importantly, blocking the things below from seeing them. The villagers had learnt not to cheer so soon, but the wall kept them in blissful ignorance, so they retreated back to town feeling safer than they had in several days. They were shielded from the wind, but somehow the small circle of sky still visible seemed even bigger and colder than usual, the blue deep and empty enough that it felt vaster than all the land to the end of the horizon combined. With the rest of the world cut off, staring upwards became dizzying, like perhaps they were not looking up but instead staring down, into a hole that fell for ever and ever. Like perhaps something was staring back. The villagers shook off the feeling and hurried into their houses as night fell, and they resolutely _did not_ think about the god, or the dizzying sky beyond their closed curtains and lit fires. The stars rose indifferent above it all as they always did.

On the sixth morning the carpenter left his house and rushed to the small door in the centre of the wall that peered out over the land. He looked and saw that the demon had reached the lochs – a series of vast lakes of the sort of intense black water that comes only from fathoms upon fathoms of crushing pressure burrowing into the depths of the world. The carpenter’s father had told him as a boy about when he had seen the lochs for himself. When he looked down from his little rowboat and into the water, he said, he would have sworn that there was no bottom to the loch, for the depths he saw were vaster than he could comprehend existing in the same world as.

“He was wrong about that,” thought the carpenter to himself with a grim smile, for the approaching god stood firmly on the bottom of the loch, and then rose above it, and then higher still, always up into the darkening clouds whose shadows swum like awful beasts on the surface of the loch. The demon was surely more inconceivably vast than any of them had imagined if it stood in the lochs as if it were a child paddling in a stream. The carpenter kicked out at the wall in anger and it toppled over the edge of the highest cliff and shattered on the jagged rocks below, but it did not matter anymore, for their petty wall would be inconsequential to a beast of such enormity.

The old man once more called the villagers to the town square.

“This god,” reported the carpenter. “It is beyond anything we know. We cannot keep it out and we cannot fight it, and it shall arrive in only five days. We are doomed to fall.”

“Do not despair yet friend! We may yet end its wrath,” said the baker.

“But we do not have the power to kill it,” pointed out the blacksmith.

“Not with steel, my friend, but we may yet kill the beast from the inside. We shall invite it to eat with us and feed it poisoned bread. Surely, even the largest beast could not survive its own insides burning it up,” the baker explained. The villagers were growing increasingly doubtful, but also increasingly desperate as the nagging fear grew in their minds each day the giant got closer, so they all agreed. The villagers rushed down to the edges of the forest that grew further down their cliff to collect the most poisonous berries there were, while in his kitchen the baker put on his apron and dragged out his biggest bag of flour from his store room, filling the air with white clouds, and began kneading the largest dough he had ever made. When the villagers returned, crowding into his small kitchen eagerly, he mixed the berries into the dough and just managed to fit the loaf inside his oven, which quickly flooded the room with the warm smell of hot fruit and browning bread. As the sun was dipping down under the farthest desert the bread finally finished cooking, and a good thing too, for the sight of the demon briefly illuminated in resplendent golden light set every nerve in every villager’s body on edge. The baker opened his oven to a burst of heat and took out the giant loaf. He carried it to the centre of town, but the villagers huddled behind closed doors did not come out to marvel at it, and the baker hurried quickly back to his own house when he caught sight of the beast in the corner of his eye, far closer than he would like. The smell of the bread filled every villager’s house that night, and as good as it was, the smell of sickly-sweet berries left an unpleasant taste in each of their mouths and an uneasy feeling in their stomachs, as if the empty vast of the night could somehow sneak under their locked doors and fill their rooms on the tail of that smell. The night grew a little darker and their fires burnt a little dimmer.

On the seventh morning all shock was gone when the villagers left their houses. It was replaced entirely with the tight, panicked grip of fear when they glanced out at the beast. It had moved yet closer and reached the ivory city. The city was an abandoned shell of white stone and ivory, a towering, vertical structure of twisted staircases and buildings stacked 50 storeys apiece, with fortified walls ten meters thick now crawling with ivy, and in the centre a looming palace spiralling upwards, the white brick glinting like an exposed bone in the landscape. It had once been humanities greatest stronghold, housing millions. Now, the tip of the highest rooftop barely scraped the giant’s knees. The villagers looked with dismay at their loaf of bread and felt all of a sudden frightfully small. The old man did not have to call a meeting, for they all huddled together in the town square when they saw this, clinging to a desperate hope of safety in numbers, the thought that together they might not be quite as small as they all felt.

“In only four days it will be upon us!” they all cried.

“We cannot kill it by any means,” dismayed the baker. “We are doomed.”

“Do not fret. I have a plan,” spoke the bard. “We cannot fight or hide from or trick the demon. But we may yet convince it. I will sing a song and entrance it to leave us.”

“You want to charm the beast into leaving?” asked the butcher doubtfully.

“We cannot kill it with force. We may as well try every avenue of trickery we have at our disposal,” said the bard. Dutifully, the villagers agreed to this plan. The bard returned to his home, where he picked up his lute and began composing a song. He worked as the sun spun overhead, until finally it was finished, and he gathered the villagers in the town square. He began playing then, soft melancholy notes ringing out and echoing in the vast emptiness of the highest cliff, music flooding the villagers like air. He sung, and the words were lost to the limitless sky, but the villagers were all brought to tears by the desperate words they couldn’t quite catch before the wind ripped them away. The old man hummed along quietly. They all agreed that this plan had as much a chance as any, and when they all went to bed that night the howling wind that beat and shook at their windows seemed to carry faint fragments of a lyric-less, mourning tune. They pulled their blankets a little closer to their chins. The bard’s candle blew itself out, plunging him into a darkness filled only with a gentle lullaby on the wind, and the stars that he could somehow see, despite the roof over his head.

On the eighth morning the giant reached their mountains. It stood taller than every peak, disappearing far above and into the dark grey clouds. The wind howled loud enough to drown out all song. It had been a fragile hope anyway. The old man called a meeting.

“The god has reached the farthest edge of where the buzzard flies overhead and the heather grows underfoot. It will be at our village in just three more days,” he said to the gathered villagers, who were shivering in the bitter morning air. The wind whipped at them, tugging frantically at the village, which was feeling more and more exposed on its lonely perch. The air smelt of a storm. The villagers felt dizzy, as if they had been falling all night. The tailor spoke:

“We cannot do this. We must ask for help.” The villagers all exchanged grim looks, knowing of whom he spoke, but a cold terror had gripped each of their hearts and filled their lungs with air that crackled and sparked like just before lightning, so they agreed, and the old man and the tailor walked together into the forest. They walked until the pine trees grew thick enough to cast them into a dappled twilight and the wind dulled until the only sound was the needles crunching underfoot. They stayed true to the path though, until they emerged into a clearing just large enough for a small cottage, but not quite big enough to brighten the shadows. Smoke puffed out of the chimney. She was home.

The tailor knocked on the door, and the witch opened it and beckoned them inside. The cottage had walls of dark wood and from the ceiling hung bundles of drying herbs and flowers. They smelled intoxicating. On the wall was a map, labelled not with countries, but with constellations. The tailor blinked.

“You have seen the demon?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied the witch.

“It is coming.”

“Yes,” she said again.

“Will you help us?”

The kettle began whistling.

“I will try,” she said.

They walked back, and the path lead them in circles, and yet still they found themselves emerging at the top of the cliff where stood the village, and below it the world. The wind howled even louder now that they knew what quiet felt like. The witch stood at the very furthest point of the cliff, where small rocks crumbled into the abyss below her feet, and stared upwards at where the beast disappeared into the sky. She raised her hands and pulled the moisture from the air around them, enveloping the village in curling mist. Then she returned to the town centre where stood the villagers, blindly clinging to each other for fear of wandering over the edge.

“The mist will hide you. But it does not mean the sky stops being above. I cannot make you larger any more than the giant can make itself smaller,” said the witch. Then she went home, humming to herself as she walked. The mist spun in eerie circles around the villagers’ outstretched hands like lost spirits. Though they could not see it, the weight of all the world still felt crushing. The cliff shook faintly under their feet as the giant strode closer. The tailor went home with a headache. In his house, no matter how much wood he piled onto the fire, the flames never seemed to reach quite far enough to keep him warm. Outside her cottage, the witch climbed to the very top of a tree and stared up, and up, and then further, and further still, and she did not look away. A peal of thunder rolled in.

On the ninth morning the villagers woke up in mist. They cautiously rose out of bed in mist, and then they ate breakfast in mist, and then set to work in mist, all the while holding their breath in anticipation. When at midday the force from the giant’s ever-growing footsteps finally blew the mist away and threw the village back into clear sight of the world, the villagers were only surprised that it had held up for so long. And terrified. Always terrified. Always waiting. The wind gripped them with invisible hands and pulled them towards the cliff’s edge. They could see the awful, incomprehensible god in clear detail now, and it was the worst thing anyone would ever see. _It would not stop walking_. A storm was growing in the clouds that shielded its body from view, and _it would not stop coming_. The sky was spinning, or perhaps the village was spinning, or perhaps it was falling into the spinning sky, and _they could not stop any of it_. The old man called a meeting.

They all gathered, but they had nothing to say. The page began to cry. Then spoke the fool:

“You dismissed me, but look now. We are helpless and in despair. I say again, there is nothing to do but flee. We must abandon our village.” Fuelled now by terror and dread and a clearer sight, the villagers agreed. Each returned to his own house to pack his belongings onto a cart and looked with tired eyes around the village their forefathers had lived in for as far back as anyone could remember. Their houses stood small but firmly planted, built to last. What a silly notion. Nothing will last. Down the slope and past the witch’s forest, the mountains spread out in a hazy blue mist as far as the eye could see, and the villagers whispered about what could lie beyond. Perhaps beyond their peaks laid another land, even vaster and stranger than the one below the cliff. Perhaps there were people there. Or perhaps the world ended when the mountains did. The villagers would prefer not to find out. But the giant’s shadow had begun to fall upon the village. They all finished tying up their lives into neat little bundles as the sun set. The horizon felt more distant than it ever had before, as if even as they stood there the world was stretching out below their feet. They all looked around their home with steely eyes and went inside hollow houses for one final night. The fool’s house felt too large and chokingly small all at once. He could feel the wind like there were no walls at all, or perhaps it was the god’s footsteps that were shaking his house to its foundations, which grew deep into the dirt like roots, clinging to the highest cliff to keep them from tumbling into the depths of rumbling, blackening clouds overhead. The stars were hidden by the storm, and they were also above and below and inside the fool. He lay down on the floor, for his bed was tied up in his cart outside, and he could not feel the ground below him as the land spun in time with the heavens above.

On the tenth morning, the god of all that does not know nor care about the villagers was one day away from them. A day’s travel was not a small amount, except that it was, for their concepts of time and space were miniscule and insignificant to the unbearable enormity of the beast. It was raining, hard. Pounding down on the villagers as they emerged from their houses to the consuming terror staring upon a god brought. They stared upon this beast, and all of sudden thinking the thought that had lodged itself in their brains became easier than breathing – which was getting harder, as the air got thinner and thinner. There was no land they could flee to that it would not reach. There was nothing any of them could do to be free. They called the old man to a meeting.

“Please,” they begged him. “We are all doomed if you will not help us. You are the oldest and wisest of any in our village. Tell us what we must do.”

The old man took a puff from his pipe and watched as the smoke he breathed out drifted past his head and upwards into the storm clouds. He said:

“There is only one thing left to do. We cannot stab or shoot or fight or pay or block or poison or charm or deceive or flee from the god. So, we must ask it to leave. We must build a tower, the height of which has never been seen before, to break through the clouds and speak with this being. We may yet be large enough to matter.” The villagers sobbed thanks and rushed to work, each gathering all the materials they could find, and on the farthest point of the highest cliff they began building up. Up, above the lands and the village and the cliff. Up, into untouched sky. Up and up they built, and when they ran out of brick they tore stone from the ground below their feet and began building with that as well. They built and built and when it was finished, teetering over the edge, there stood the tallest tower there ever was or will be, reaching into the storm and disappearing through the clouds that pooled around it like ripples. As day sulked away the old man began to climb. Inside the tower was only a narrow spiral staircase that seemed to go on forever. He walked in circles up and up and up, until his head was spinning and he couldn’t see straight. Always up. When he reached the top of the tower he was standing above the storm, and everything was still. There was no wind. It was quiet. Above him, more stars than he could ever have imagined shone, filling every square inch of the lightless sky. It was beautiful. He turned towards where the god’s head should have broken through the clouds. Where it should have stopped. It did not. The god did not stop. It was not just vast. It was everything. It shone with the light of a million stars and yet it was completely

and utterly empty, a vast, cosmic expanse of all that exists and will exist. It did not look at the old man for it had no eyes to see, and it did not need to see when it _was_. It spun and the old man spun too, for they had always been one. He was falling. He was standing perfectly still. The sky above him was not above him and it never had been above him, for it was not a roof to the world but instead an opening. This was not the highest tower, or the highest cliff, but rather the furthest point jutting out into the uncaring abysmal oblivion that was everything. They were a part of the everything, and so the highest could not exist, for direction could not exist when everything had no end and no beginning. Height was a pretty lie to make the world seem big enough to matter, just like everything else the villagers did.

The god did not care about any of this. It had never stopped moving and it never would. It could not see the village, not because their shallow walls actually protected them from the storm outside, but because the storm did not exist to frighten the villagers. It rained because it rained and it always would, and rain does not know what pain or fear is. The old man could not hear the thunder. The giant could not hear him speak. After all, sound doesn’t carry in space.

The old man quietly descended the tower. The villagers were waiting, and they were soaking wet. The world was utterly drained of colour in the midst of the downpour, shades of grey lit up occasionally by sudden arcing, branching flashes of lightning coming from higher than just the storm.   
“It will never hear us. And it will never stop. There is nothing that can change this,” the old man said to the villagers.

And now the eye of the storm reached the villagers, and a moments calm descended. The sound of the raging wind softened, as if they were listening as a child would when the thunder startled them, with the blanket pulled high over their ears to muffle the noise. Above them, they could see the stars. They could always see the stars, if they looked hard enough. They knew now what they always had known: that the old man’s words were the truth. There was nothing they could do. The giant would reach them at dawn. Dawn was a long way away, and it had always been just about to break. It would bring no hope. The eye of the storm passed on, and the rain beat down once more on the villagers. And they ran to the very edge of the cliff-that-wasn’t-the-highest, and leapt off, plummeting in a direction that was not down. They fell for only a second, like the ground had always been waiting for them, before they were dashed on the rocks below.

Up above, the storm raged on for a couple of hours more, until finally it was done raining, and the clouds began to clear. The air smelt of ozone and petrichor. In one of the trees, a bird began to sing.

The god did not notice them lying tangled on the rocks below as it strode past. It kept walking, unchanged and onwards and everything, evermore.

And above it all the stars blinked and shone, and then spun down over the horizon as a cloudless dawn broke, as it always had done, and as it always will.

**Author's Note:**

> it did occur to me checking this that I probably shouldn't read the ending as hopeful as I do, considering the mass suicide and all. im just a sucker for the world carrying on in all its beauty in the face of human's existential despair. anyway that was a fun three weeks but im gonna go back to doing absolutely shit all now


End file.
